Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Its all about entropy

In today's lecture I discussed ideal solutions and osmotic pressure. This illustrates the surprising fact that the thermodynamics of dilute solutions is dominated by entropic effects and much of the conceptual formalism of mixing of ideal gases can be carried over, even though the interaction of the solute with the solvent molecules may be highly non-trivial.

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Tony Leggett (1938-2026): condensed matter theorist

Tony Leggett died last week. The New York Times has a nice obituary. One measure of his influence on me is that more than 20 posts on this ...